Urban Harvest

I’m down in the (almost) deep South of North Carolina, and the contrast in vegetation between this humid hot place and the” Great High and Dry” always amazes me. Yesterday I was eating fresh figs from the tree in back. I had no idea figs grew here. I somehow assumed they were from Biblical lands. (Hey, no jokes about the Bible Belt).

If you have never eaten a fresh fig, then this is a treat you should add to your bucket list. Figs taste like a cross between a ripe kiwi and a strawberry to me. I have to discover ways of using them. They all ripen at once and as delicious as they are, there’s a limit to how many can reasonably be scarfed down at once.

Even in Calgary, there are local edibles to be had. Apples, crab apples and Nanking cherries are regular bounties in back yards all over the city in gardens tended and untended. Yet, most of it goes uneaten. It’s not a real loss if the fruit is composted and added back to the garden, but it seems a shame in these days of tasteless and oversprayed foreign produce that we neglect the organic, and healthful food locally available.

Apples may be smaller, uneven in shape and (gasp) have a blemish or two, but the taste of a local apple more than makes up for our skewed notions of what a tasty apple should look like. Go in your yard and try one. Dare ya!

The good news is that there are community urban harvest efforts in cities all over, and Calgary is no exception. The Calgary Urban Harvest Project under the Permaculture Calgary Guild connects volunteer harvesters with trees available for harvesting. (click on link to learn more). Harvest is shared between the homeowner, food banks and others. Consider joining this worthwhile effort or register your own trees for harvest.

Looking local, and using the resources we have at hand may seem like a ‘New Agey’ thing to some, but it may soon become essential to look at what we have in our own gardens and cities first before shipping in more stuff from distant places. The price of fuel alone and the environmental costs of burning it just to bring us good-looking but fairly tasteless produce and plastic doodads from China should strike us as ludicrous. I think it soon will.

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